Friday, October 18, 2013

Feel free to download and print the Parsha sheet and share it with your friends and family: Click here:Parshat Vayera

A Thought on the Parsha - Killing in the Name of God?

Is it ever permissible to kill an innocent person in the name of
God? Both our religious and ethical intuitions scream “no”! Halakha
and Torah values consistently underscore the sanctity of human life and
the injustice of allowing harm to come to innocent people, and from an
ethical standpoint such an act is the very definition of murder. We
only need to look at the evening news or the morning paper to see the
hundreds, sometimes thousands, of lives that can be destroyed when
people believe that they have a divine warrant, or worse, a divine
mandate to kill for a religious cause. For us Americans, the horror of
this hit home 12 years ago on September 11th, and for people
in certain countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East such
horrors are suffered on an almost daily basis.

How
then are we to approach the story of the Akeida? This story is
presented as a great, if not the greatest, religious achievement on the
part of Avraham: “By myself have I sworn, says the Lord, for because
you have done this thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son,
that I will surely bless you... and through your offspring shall all
the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have listened to my
voice.” (Breishit 22:16-18). What is this achievement if not the
willingness to obey God’s command even if asked to murder an innocent
child. Obedience to God trumps ethics, trumps the mandate against
murder. Is that the message we are supposed to take away from this
story?

To begin to answer this question, we need first to recognize our
religious and moral responsibilities as readers of the Torah. There are
many possible interpretations of any story in the Torah. “Shivim panim la’Torah”,
there are 70 faces to every narrative, every verse, in the Torah. As
readers of a challenging story such as this, we must ask ourselves not
just what it could mean, but also what possible meanings is it our
obligation to underscore and emphasize, and what possible meanings is it
our obligation to marginalize and even reject.

The reading that
absolutely must be rejected is that we must murder innocents if God
commands us to do so. That reading of the akeida story, it should be
noted, has been the dominant one since Soren Kierkegaard’s book, Fear and Trembling.
In that book, Kierkegaard frames the test of the Akeida as whether
Avraham would act as a religious person, a “knight of faith” to obey
God’s command even to violate universal ethical mandates. He calls this
a “teleological suspension of the ethical”. This was the test - faith
or ethics? Obedience or morality?

But this is not how the test
has been understood in our tradition, and particularly not in our
liturgy. The refrain in our tefillot is: “Just as Avraham overcame his
compassion to do Your will with a full heart, so should Your compassion
overcome Your anger against us.” That is to say: Avraham’s great
achievement was not obedience to God when it contravenes morality, it
was obedience to God when it contravenes fatherly love. Avraham was
being called upon to give up his only son from Sarah: “your one son,
your only son, the one whom you love”. To do this, he had to give up
what was most dear, and to do so at an unimaginable psychic and
emotional toll. The message then for us is that we too, when called
upon by God, should be prepared to do what is most difficult, no matter
the hardship, no matter the cost.

How
then to deal with the fact that killing Yitzchak was not only a great
personal sacrifice, but also the taking of a human life, an act of
murder? That problem seems to be ignored, or bracketed, in our
tradition and liturgy. It is perhaps best explained by acknowledging
that at that time such an act would not have been seen as murder, rather
as a sacrifice. This idea is hard for us to grasp, but consider the
analogy to abortion. Is it murder or is it a women’s right to her own
body? What to one person, or in one place, or at one time in history,
may seem evil and horrific may, at another time and place, seem
ethically acceptable. In Avraham’s time, child sacrifice was not only a
religious act, but an ethically acceptable one as well. Thus, he was
not asked to perform murder, just to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Does
this solve the problem? Is this the reading we should adopt? Well,
no. Because if this is how we read the story, then what is our
takeaway? Partly, to make sacrifices to serve God. That certainly is a
message we need for our times. But also, what? That taking an innocent
life is not necessarily murder? If it wasn’t murder for Avraham, why
is it murder for us? Maybe all of our ethical absolutes should be seen
as relative. Maybe there are times we should listen to God even to
kill an innocent person. Maybe such an act can be a sacrifice and not
murder. In fact, we know that in the Middle Ages, during the Crusades,
some Jews slaughtered their children, and then themselves, as a way of
protecting their children and their selves against forced conversion.
And they invoked the akeida when they did so. In their minds, they were
replicating the test of Avraham: They were ready to make the ultimate
sacrifice to serve God. Not only were they ready to do so, but they
actually did so! And for them this was not murder, it was a sacrifice.

I
would suggest a different reading of the Akeida story. This reading
starts from the fact that Avraham’s act was not only about obedience, it
was also about faith, faith that could persevere even in the face of
its contradiction. Faith in God and God’s promise that Yitzchak would
be the future of Avraham’s family and through whom all of God’s promises
would be fulfilled: “For in Yitzchak will your progeny be called”
(21:12). Avraham was able to have faith in God’s promise even when God
had told him to act in a way that would contravene it.

Avraham
had another type of faith as well. Another faith in the face of
contradiction. Avraham was both prepared to listen to God regardless of
what God would ask of him, even to take his son, even to commit murder,
but he was at the same time unshaken in his belief that God would never
ask him to commit murder. How did he demonstrate this? By listening
to the angel. Consider: It was God who told him to sacrifice his son.
So when the angel revoked this command, Avraham could have said: Sorry.
I’ll need to hear that from God Godself. But Avraham didn’t say that.
Avraham was able to hear the angel. He was able to hear the smaller
voice. Not the dominant, loud voice that said: offer your son as a
sacrifice, but the small, whispering voice that said: God does not want
your son. God would never ask you to commit such an act.

When
we tell the story of the akeida, our first religious and moral
responsibility to emphasize the end of the story, not the beginning. To
learn not that we must be prepared to murder in the name of God, but
that God will never ask us to commit murder in God’s name. This is what
the angel is teaching Avraham. This is the first lesson we must
learn.

The
second lesson is, if it seems that God is asking us to do such a
horrific deed, then we must find a way to hear the voice of the angel.
We must be prepared to hear the softer voices in our tradition, even if
they are not the dominant ones. The softer voices that say: “You must
have misunderstood. God will never ask this of you. Go back, listen
again, you will see that that is not what God meant.” Rashi states this
nicely. After the angel came, God in effect said to Avraham, “Yes, I
said put him up as a sacrifice. You put him up. Now you can take him
down.”

Our
responsibility as readers of the story is the same as that of Avraham
at the akeida. It is to know the role that we play in listening,
interpreting, and retelling the word of God. It is the partnership that
we as humans have with God. It is to submit ourselves to the text,
but to know that we also interpret the text. It is to be prepared to do
anything that God asks of us, and to know that God will never ask for
us to murder in God’s name. It is the obligation to hear both the voice
of God and at the same time the voice of the angel. It is nothing less
than Torah she’b’al Peh.

I hope you all are well. This week has been an
exciting one at the yeshiva, as we had our Community Beit Midrash kickoff event
on Tuesday night at Hadar. I, together with Rabbi Ethan Tucker and
Erin Leib-Smokler engaged in a panel discussion on the Akeida, addressing the
questions: Is true service to God achieved through submission? What is God
trying to communicate in asking Abraham to sacrifice his son? And what is
achieved when God cancels that command? After we each presented our
individual takes on the akeida, we shifted into a chavruta-mode discussion,
challenging one another and learning from each other. The evening
ended with response to questions from the audience, which numbered close to 150
people. Everyone left with a tremendous high, enriched with new insights
into this challenging story, and inspired by the very experience of our sharing
and learning Torah with one another.

To see the full schedule for coming Tuesday nights, and to
hear the audio of the event, please visit our website page, here. The
Community Beit Midrash is sponsored by YCT, Hadar and Maharat, with the
participation of JTS, HUC and Drisha, and approximately 45 of our students, in
addition to any interested community members, come together each Tuesday night
to learn bi’chavruta and to hear a shiur. The learning will
continue at Hadar through Tuesday, Nov. 5, and will then take place at YCT
starting Tuesday, Nov. 12. Come and join the learning!

We also had the special privilege of having Rabbi Dr. Daniel
Sperber visit our yeshiva on Wednesday. Rabbi Sperber spoke on his
experiences in India and encounter with Hinduism and Hindu religious leaders
and raised the question as to its halakhic categorization as avoda zara, and
the presentation ended with a lively exchange between Rabbi Sperber and myself
regarding what that halakhic categorization is and how to create the proper
balance between inclusion and setting boundaries.

Finally, we are sad to announce the passing of the father of
our student, Joel Dinin (YCT 2015), this last Shabbat in Los Angeles. We
are also sad to announce the passing of the grandmother of Daniel Millner (YCT
2014). Our wishes of nechama to Joel and his family and to Daniel
and his family. HaMakom Yinachem etchem bi’tokh she’ar avalei Tzion
vi’Yerushalayim.